Why do some people take the law into their own hands, shirking conformity
and risking everything to liberate animals from abuse and torture? Longtime
Animal Liberation Front activist
Keith Mann, who's spent several years in British jails, shares his
account of a raid on a battery hen complex in the UK, offering an insight
into the motivations of those who engage in illegal direct action.

13 March 2011

Somewhere in the Hampshire countryside--

It is cold, very, very dark and eerily silent except for the sound of
wild animals scurrying about in the undergrowth. There are rats everywhere,
but nothing compared to the numbers inside the buildings.

They aren't really the focus of anyone's attention, though it's hard to
ignore them as they run over some of the humans squatting on their
territory. This is less than a fun night out for any of this team, but for
two or three silent sufferers in the undergrowth waiting for word to move
in, this is a living nightmare.

Not bad out of 16 people! How many friends can you persuade to hide up in
a dark, spooky remote woodland late at night with rats scuttling around, and
with worse yet to come? Bet you wouldn't find many takers!

And it isn't just that you have to trust wild rats--you have to trust your
work mates, and be certain that they don't mind running the risk of spending
some time in prison as a reward, and not dropping you in it.

This is southern England, Good Friday, circa 2004. Within this isolated
woodland are hidden volunteers from the Animal Liberation Front.

Also hidden from the outside world are three huge warehouses and a stench
like no other. Inside the stinking warehouses, there are so many female
chickens in cages stacked in rows you would be literally overcome by the
stench before you could count them.

All are incarcerated in egg units laying Farm Fresh Eggs to fill
supermarket shelves with cheap chicken's periods. No one cares enough to do
anything about what goes on here except for the small group on site and
others of a like mind who not only boycott the product, but break these
birds out to take them to a better life.

That we allow this form of mass cruelty to take place is a gross
indictment of our claim to being a sophisticated society of animal lovers
and this farm is far from an isolated case. Such units can contain tens of
thousands of juvenile red hens, descendants of the red jungle fowl of
Southeast Asia.

Its modern incarcerated cousin is exploited to the absolute extreme. Back
in the 1970s these 'chicken sheds', as these monstrous places are so called,
could hide endless double-decker buses so vast was their size and this mass
exploitation has been expanding ever since.

One of the earliest rescue raids on just such a chicken shed not a
million miles from here was carried out by six friends who met at an animal
welfare meeting in the south of England in 1975; seen as rather eccentric
then, in today's society they would be described by animal farmers, the
mainstream media and politicians as 'extremists'.

Overnight, they became 'activists', endlessly on the lookout for the
animal abuse about which they were so outraged. One Sunday afternoon, they
simply parked their cars on a grass verge, climbed over a gate, walked
across a field to the rear of a farm in Hampshire-'the county of cruelty' as
one called it--and unbolted the first shed door they came to.

The scene was exactly the same then as it is now, 30 years later. Same
county, different farm. Countless birds crammed in cages sounding decidedly
unhappy. Fearful of being shot or caught by an angry farmer, and with only a
few homes secured, the group were out of there with a bird each in less than
15 minutes.

It took that long because the wretched cages wouldn't open. It's a lesson
many budding rescuers have had to learn on the job through experience: all
the cage doors are different! They all agreed afterwards that they could
have rescued more had they been calmer at the time but it was a start--the
start of something bigger: animal rights 'extremism'!

It was a simple but effective thing to do, and it was to be done again
and again, with activists taking more and more time to rescue more and more
birds. Battery hens: plentiful, uncomplicated and exploited mercilessly have
inspired generations of activists to overstep the boundaries of legitimate
protest.

The Good Friday raiders have to wait until the last of the workers have
gone home for the night before moving in, but it's essential to act quickly
the moment it's safe. There's a lot of work to do.

Bizarrely, it is still possible to simply open the doors to some of these
units and walk in. Such is the sprawl of filth and the death; it appears it
simply isn't worth locking the doors. One would surely want to hide this
grotesque example of how to do something bad badly, but stuck out in the
middle of nowhere with only fields and a clump of trees around the stinking,
infested shit storage units, who's going to look?

No one in his or her right mind would voluntarily go inside. As long as
eggs keep coming out, nothing else matters.

Only a small number of activists are prepared to wade through the waste
pits below the cages. Occasionally the farmer will drive a tractor in to
scoop out the mountain of droppings, dead birds and broken eggs and scatter
them on his fields, but aside from that, this is a hidden world.

As soon as the last of the workers have driven down the track and out of
the woodland, balaclavas are adjusted and people emerge from their hiding
places. Until two hours earlier, most didn't even know what they would be
doing; they just knew they would be needed.

It's never a pleasant experience confronting cruelty, but as difficult as
it is for some to deal with, the pain of trying is easier than doing
nothing. Opening the rotten wooden door at the base of the first unit
exposes a fresh nightmare for those with a phobia for rats. Those who'd
previously been to reccy the site had warned them about this, but for all
that, their description failed to impart the true picture.

There's almost no describing the full horror of the scenes inside these
units.

The smell is the first thing that hits you and it does quite literally
hit you. Imagine the accumulated festering waste of thousands of chickens
piled high. There's waste below the cages for as far as torchlight can see,
the peaks are like the Alps rising toward the sky.

Above them are the pale feet of baby birds, their toes on wire above the
mess and a thick mass of grey, ancient cobwebs around the cages and girders
and walls, forming like a second skin on the structure of the building,
hanging in the dank air.

Underneath and on top of the compacted waste are thousands of rats; the
floor seems to move with them; they are the floor. They stop and stare and
scurry, looking for food, fallen crumbs, eggs, dead chickens. They run into
your legs and over your feet. They run over piles of feathers scattered
among the waste.

One rat stands on top of a pile and looks down at the intruders. The pile
of feathers is a live bird fallen from a cage, but she's been down there
some time and has no life left in her to complain. She might be stuck or
starving or injured--who cares? Her head stays firmly buried in her chest.
The rat thought her a good vantage point so she's good for something.

The birds resign themselves to their fate. There's not a lot they can do
about it; there's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide and no way out. You fall
down there, you die down there. Unless you are one of the lucky ones that
gets to meet an 'extremist.'

The team first split into working groups to comb each of the pits for the
fallen birds who have slipped the net during loading, round up or escaped
from broken cages. Only the farmhands know how they get there and they don't
give a damn.

It's hard to tell at first glance whether a bundle of feathers in the
dirt is alive or dead. Many get huge weights of congealed waste stuck to
their legs rendering them unable to move, so they just sit there until they
die. There are birds at every level of life, death and decomposition in
these pits.

Some are just able to blink in the torchlight--that close to death--either
weighted to the spot or caught in a deep pool of sodden waste formed under a
dripping water pipe. Slowly rotting to death. It's no reward for the huge
obligation demanded from them at a few weeks of age.

It's enough to direct someone with faultless enthusiasm to elicit the
rescue of these birds, but it isn't that easy according to Leah, a
17-year-old trainee dental nurse on her first raid. Her older sister who
does this kind of thing routinely has asked her along. Leah writes later:

It took us so long going through
our unit, the third one, because of the amount of water in there. We thought
it must have been the same in them all but I realised later we got the short
straw! It was like wading through quicksand.

The four of us got stuck up to our
knees more than once and we had to keep rescuing each other and our boots!
The worst of it was spending ages struggling through to a bird in the
distance only to find it was dead.

One I waded through to was ninety
percent sunk with only her blinking eye to attract me, but she died in my
arms. She was tiny and weighed nothing. I guess her dream came true and
someone came to take her to the sunny farmyard she'd heard was pictured on
the side of the egg boxes, but it was too much for her little body to cope
with. It was the saddest thing I think has ever happened to me.

It made me feel so proud to be
with all those other people, really different people, all working really
hard to save some chickens. I was brought up to think about all life. My old
school friends mostly eat meat and just don't care; they just wouldn't
understand why anyone would bother stopping eating chicken, never mind doing
this!

But when you see it for real, you
can't turn away. Gina (not her real name) had tried to keep me away from
this side of being an 'animal lover' to protect me, but I needed to
experience something like this to make me realise what I need to do with my
life. Fixing people's teeth isn't going to be it! You can smell the meat
inside people, you know!

There are dozens of living birds in each of the pits and many more dead
ones. There are little colonies of black beetles in and under the corpses,
the floor beneath them alive as they recoil en masse from the torchlight
back into the shit.

The surviving birds are the first to be loaded into bread crates and
piled in the back of one of the vehicles backed up to the entrance doors.
It's cramped and will be like that for a few hours, but it's five-star
accommodation compared to what they have had to endure so far in their short
lives.

By the time the Unit 3 team gets back to Unit 1, someone has cut a big
hole in the caging above the pits near the doors where the waste isn't so
deep. Birds are being passed down and transferred into big bright coloured
plastic laundry bags, four or five in each one. The only colour in this
dreadful place.

There is a human conveyor belt of bags and birds moving gradually from
cages to crates to who knows where. Do they know these humans have good
intentions, or is this it: that terrible, final journey to the
slaughterhouse?

There is a lookout posted in the woods by the gate, but no one is
expected to return to the farm until early in the morning. Everyone has a
lot to lose should they be caught red-handed in the middle of a
'conspiracy'--not least the owners of the horseboxes on site loaned on a
promise they will be returned safely--but the work is being done at a
careful, steady, relaxed pace.

Rushing things is a waste of valuable energy and besides, these birds are
fragile. According to reports and observations, many birds suffer at least
one broken bone during the round up for slaughter and whilst they are
unloaded at the other end. No one along that route cares, that's for sure.

Upstairs among the cages, the miserable individual stories are far
outnumbering those down below. 'How many can we take?' is Leah's first
hopeful query, after she has been helped up to the aisles to do a shift.

There's no way you can take them all without far more hands or far more
time. There are just too many and they're stacked up high, huddled five to a
cage. Perhaps less if cage mates have died, leaving space to stretch a
little, perhaps something soft to stand on for a while.

But which ones do you take? The first you come to seems to be the best
method, that way you don't beat yourself up choosing who gets to spend the
next 10 years pottering around pecking and chasing moths and who gets
shipped to the slaughterhouse physically worn out and traumatised to be
brutally killed.

It's a cruel world, but whose fault is that? Surely not the fault of
vegan 'extremists' breaking from the ranks of the norm?

There are so many aisles it would be easy to lose everyone else. There
are so many birds, probably 100,000, each one so programmed to resume the
routine of eating that they begin as the torch brings light to the darkness.
That's what they do for eighteen hours of artificial daylight: eat.

Indeed all chickens behave this way--they see a light and they eat! And
dust bathe. And lay eggs. And therein lies the problem: they can lay daily
and are forced to do so with the flick of a switch. They all look broken and
resigned. What are their other options?

They fight, hence the debeaking process that slices off the tip of their
beak and limits the amount of damage they can do to each other. Some sound
really disturbed. Periodically there will be a pained scream in a distant
aisle--that of a bird finally broken, driven insane, dying? Who knows? You'd
never find her. It sounds like it'd be too late anyway.

There are some birds lying on the floor outside the cages, not quite
dead. Others are dead. They've been pulled out as failures, no longer
profitable. As the weeks turn to months, the overcrowding is resolved as
naturally as can be in this environment and by the end of the cycle, by the
end of the year, there may be just one bird left.

No one cares much as long as they've lived long enough to leave a
sufficient profit in their wake--but pump them with as many antibiotics as
you like, you can't make them stay alive, laying eggs forever. They are very
fragile.

The sad thing is, they do stay alive and continue laying those precious
eggs long after the year they're incarcerated in a cage if you just leave
them alone. Instead of which, they're forced to the extreme for a few more
eggs.

Compared to the vast numbers exploited, ALF's rescue statistics are
pitiful. Nevertheless, since 1975 many thousands of individuals have been
whisked out of this kind of living hell and onto the Animal Liberation
Underground Railroad where they have been able to live out their lives in
peace.

Three hours later, one horsebox full of birds trundles slowly out of the
woods as a second one pulls in, lights dimmed, and reverses to the doors.
For the hard working raiders this is a pleasure after all.

It's hard for anyone to say how they're all doing because the birds were
spread far and wide, but over six hours that night this small group bagged
up, boxed up and sent on their way over a thousand chickens to good homes.

The 'girls' were driven first to prearranged safe houses from where they
were later distributed to people keen to live alongside them in mutual
harmony in back gardens, allotments, farms and smallholdings, long after
fertility.

Bizarrely, this compassionate way of life is viewed as 'criminal
behaviour' in the eyes of the law.

If the police track down the birds they'll be put back in cages. They are
someone's property after all and it matters little if they suffer, you're
not allowed to rescue them. So what can you do?

Let's see.

Weeks after the Animal Liberation Front raid on the Wallops Wood Farm,
the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) were
informed of the conditions and encouraged to investigate.

The RSPCA is supposed to help animals: 'RSPCA Action For Animals'--it says
so on the promos. Staggeringly, the RSPCA Inspector didn't even bother to
check out the farm's conditions, and said he didn't even need to see the
video footage because a poultry expert--a vet he knew--had been shown the
footage and assured him that there was nothing illegal in the way the birds
were slowly wasting away in the pits or dying on the floor outside the
cages.

The Inspector was happy to agree while the Expert shrugged his shoulders
and said such cruelty is a trade-off if we want cheap eggs. The RSPCA
clearly does not prioritise animal welfare above profit.

Oddly enough, Trading Standards at the local council and its special
Animal Welfare Department are the people to contact, if you are keen on
wasting your time.

They'd been to Wallops Wood before and animal welfare charities and
campaign groups all agree that Trading Standards inspection teams turn up
without warning and they were certainly pretty quick off the mark here.

However, the inspectors rapidly cooled down and the charities and the
volunteer groups all concur that in reality prosecutions rarely happen. A
year earlier, Trading Standards were called to the same place and
coincidentally turned up at the farm the day after the units had been
'depopulated' and the spent society of little ladies within decamped to the
slaughterhouse for conversion into chicken stock or something like.

Apparently they aren't much good for anything else! The inspectors
weren't directed to look under the units, only in the cages and as the cages
were empty the place was given a clean bill of health.

Tipped off a second time, they made another visit to the farm and were
directed specifically to the waste pits below the cages. They were equipped
with video footage taken by the raiders, depicting the suffering of fallen
stock, footage of rats in cages with laying hens, the filth, and hens
crammed in cages. They'd seen it all before and weren't minded to do
anything about it.

They told the farmer off and said they advised him to fish out the birds
below the units but only one month later there were dozens of live hens
still there. What the farmer had done as a priority was replace the old
wooden walls with huge solid steel ones bolted from the inside to keep out
prying eyes, effectively sealing in from rescuers the birds that fall and
making the situation worse.

Anyone care? Trading Standards in Hampshire were themselves more
concerned that people had entered this site without protective clothing and
may have transferred disease, and wanted names!

The question of the appalling conditions in which the birds were forced
to live did not even enter their radar! Only the extremists have since been
into those stinking cellars and the aisles above to rescue other birds.

By way of contrast, a 42-year-old man who was found guilty in 2004 of
causing unnecessary suffering to 2,000 birds that were found dead, dying,
diseased and living in utter squalor at his farm was given a conditional
discharge and ordered to pay '75 costs.

Two men arrested for rescuing some birds from the cages had their homes
raided, spent months on bail and were fined 1,000-dollars each.

Keith Mann is a British animal
rights campaigner who first came to widespread public attention after being
sentenced in 1994 to 14 years imprisonment, reduced to 11 years on
appeal--one of the longest sentences handed down to an animal rights
activist--after being arrested in 1991 for conspiracy to set meat lorries on
fire and for having escaped from custody. He has been the subject of a
Channel 4 documentary Angels of
Mercy? (watch part 1
and part 2).
He is the author ofFrom Dusk Till Dawn: An Insider's
View of the Animal Liberation Movement.